The 2009 Pandemic Flu – A Premature Retrospective

We may have been lucky once again. The H1N1 / Swine flu epidemic which was first reported in Mexico in 2009 hasn't proved as deadly as early reports suggested it might be.

It's influenza. It's a pandemic.

It will kill a lot of people over the next three years.

But it doesn't look like it will be anywhere near as deadly as the flu pandemic of 1918.

It looks like it is another near miss, which means that we may have the chance to learn some lessons from the current outbreak...

Full article at http://www.riskythinking.com/articles/article39.php

Pandemic Watch - Good Information Sources

In case you haven't noticed, there's an increased risk of a pandemic from a fairly lethal variant of H1N1 influenza which seems to incorporate a mix of genetic material from swine flu, avian flu and human influenza.

Some good sources of information you should be monitoring:

• Wikipedia 2009 swine flu outbreak page
• WHO Epidemic and Pandemic Alert and Response
• PandemicFlu.gov (US Government information and advice)
• Center for Disease Control and Prevention (US Government)

And a really bad source of information, but one which will give you an idea of the rumors circulating (and the reason why you will need to educate your staff to avoid panic):

• Twitter search on flu topics

If you haven't put some form of pandemic plan in place, now is probably a good time to do so.

Note: there is a software package which can help speed up your planning here. I don't know of any others. [Disclaimer: I helped create it.]

[Updated: fixed error in twitter search link.]